From the New York Times (links from the original) and so what, no official will take responsible, honorable, grown-up action:

For more than a decade, wads of American dollars packed into suitcases, backpacks and, on occasion, plastic shopping bags have been dropped off every month or so at the offices of Afghanistan’s president — courtesy of the Central Intelligence Agency.

All told, tens of millions of dollars have flowed from the C.I.A. to the office of President Hamid Karzai, according to current and...

Last week, I traveled to Florida to discuss American Betrayal:The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character in the Presidential Speakers Series sponsored by Embry Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona. The book, which, in fact, doesn't come out until May 28, couldn't have had a nicer debut with host Marc Bernier helming the interview. Bonus: We ended up discussing current Saudi events for the first 30 minutes, before tucking into exactly what American Betrayal is about.

Seeing as the pub date is one month from today (and counting down), I am posting the interview.

Earlier this year, I wrote a series of posts (also here) on "The Fox Effect," which analyzed Fox coverage of Islamic stories through the Saudi scrim -- in other words, keeping in mind the part-ownership (7 percent) of News Corp. by ranking Saudi scion Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, and the part-ownership (nearly 20 percent) of Rotana (Alwaleed's media company) by Rupert Murdoch. (More coverage here.) The series culminated with a lengthy Q & A with Ryan Lauro here.

In this week's syndicated column, I note that Fox -- where Steve Emerson first broke the news that Saudi 3B-terrorist and ex-"person of interest" in the Boston bombing, Abdul Rahman Ali Alharbi, was slated for deportation on "national security grounds" -- appears to have "dropped" the story. That is too tepid a term. While Glenn Beck appeared on O'Reilly last night to present his team's ground-breaking work on the MSM-ignored story, Fox hasn't just dropped the story. The network is censoring it.

Let’s pick up where last week’s column left off with that Saudi national in Boston – Abdul Rahman Ali Alharbi, the 20-year-old “student” who was acting suspiciously enough after the Boston bombing to be “detained” under guard at the hospital and named a person of interest in the April 15 attack.

That same day, law enforcement searched Alharbi’s Boston-area apartment for seven hours, leaving with bags of evidence at around 2 a.m. on Tuesday, April 16. On Tuesday afternoon, a sub-agency of the Department of Homeland Security created what is called an “event file” on Alharbi, calling for his visa to be revoked due to ties to terrorism. That same afternoon, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper would inform the Senate Intelligence Committee that Alharbi was now merely a “witness.”

The Western world gasses and sputters and anything else to avoid the obvious: Islam made them do it, You know who I mean, and you know what they did, and you know Islam made them do it, too. But such a concept, obvious as noses on faces, etc., is kept under wraps and strangled until it is not only unsayable but unthinkable, too.

We may not have rid ourselves of terrorism, but we've rid ourselves of Islam, sure as shooting (can I say that?). Soon, all Americans, not just the president, will be more likely to link "terrorism" to "tax day" than to that religion -- what was it called? Explosions, attacks, will, of course, "occur" -- as traffic accidents do -- but fear not: We will get better and better at cleaning blood from our streets, amassing heaps of teddy bears in bereaved neighbors' driveways, rehabbing legless athletes, raising money for the young and permanently disabled.

"Boston Strong," we cry out.

Maybe next time, it will be "Houston Strong." Then "Seattle, Atlanta or Schenectedy...

A press release on the FBI website of Friday, April 19, 2013 tells us that "a foreign government" -- Russia -- alerted the FBI in "early 2011" that Tamarlan Tsarnaev was "a follower of radical Islam and a strong believer, and that he had changed drastically since 2010 as he prepared to leave the United States for travel to the country's region to join unspecified underground groups."

How you say "radical Islam" in Russian? Never mind. This is big and shocking news on several levels. The first concerns the government reflex to suppress speculation regarding Islamic terrorism, or even terrorism, period as when David Axelrod let fly that the president was thinking "tax day" might be what we used to obsess over as the so-called root cause. We might even look back on FBI's special agent in charge Richard DesLauriers' plea to the public on Thursday evening (April 18) as reinforcing the domestic confines of the suspect pool by omission. His carefully genericized statement failed to open the public mind to any suggestion that the suspects might not be homegrown locals.

The "ethno-masochists" are in mourning. They didn't get their man. Their white man. That bitter-clinger, church-going,Tea Party patriot of their dreams. This thwarted desire -- seething, pulsing, coursing through the flow of commentary all week -- was the ugly undercurrent to our national stress over another Islamic terrorist attack, this time in Boston, that has again torn at our civlizational fabric. But something else is tearing at that same fabric. And that is the fact that more than anything else, the Left wanted this terrorism to have been plotted and inflicted by one of our own.

We don't see such uniform deviance immediately on display after 9/11. Then, the Left and almost everyone else would be pre-occupied and distracted with the question, "Why do they hate us?"...

Even as our focus remains on the manhunt for the second Chechen suspect, this Saudi story still simmers ....

This week's syndicated column

After the FBI rescheduled another postponed briefing on the Boston Marathon Massacre for 8 p.m. on Wednesday night – and then canceled that one, too – that was it. I was going to give the news circus a rest until morning.

Came the dawn I heard that terrorism expert Steven Emerson had dropped a bombshell Wednesday night on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program. Emerson reported that Abdulrahman Ali Alharbi, the Saudi national first identified as a “person of interest” and then downgraded, like a tropical storm, to “witness,” would be deported from the United States “on national security grounds.” This, Emerson added, “is very unusual.”

Yes. But also no. Amid similar conditions – a terrorist attack, an ongoing investigation and Saudi...

Here is another photo of men with backpacks that has been making the Internet rounds. Anthony Gucciardi at InfoWars.com makes an interesting case that one of these men in wearing a ball cap with a SEAL-type logo. Judging by their gear, Gucciardi's guess is that the men may be employees of "the Blackwater-style private military/security firm Craft International." If so, why were they there? Taking in race day? Of course, maybe the guy just bought a hat with a SEAL-type logo.

Authorities have clear video images of two separate suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings carrying black bags at each explosion site and are planning to release the images today in an appeal for the public’s help in identifying the men, according to an official briefed on the case.

The official said that the two suspects were seen separately on videotape — one at each of the two bombing sites, which are located about a block apart.

The official, who spoke this morning on the condition of anonymity, said the best video has come from surveillance cameras on the same side of Boylston Street as the explosions. The official said the widely reported Lord and Taylor surveillance camera, and snapshots from individual cellphone camera users, have not provided the clearest...

We still don't know what ideological-brand of terror-suspect we're looking at, but media are reporting that a suspect has been arrested -- OR NOT -- and CNN's John King is apologizing for his first bite of the scoop.

From HuffPo:

CNN's John King caused some controversy on Wednesday when he said that a potential suspect in the Boston bombings was a "dark-skinned male."

King was the first to report that law enforcement officials had identified a suspect in Monday's bloody attacks.

"I want to be very careful about this, because people get very sensitive when you say these things," he said. "I was told by one of these sources who is a law enforcement official that this is a dark-skinned male."

He said that there had been a further description given, but he was refraining from sharing it with viewers.

QUESTION: Thank you, Patrick. This morning, there was supposed to be a photo opportunity with the Secretary and the Foreign Minister of Saudi Arabia. Could you tell us why it was canceled?

MR. VENTRELL: Well, first of all, let me provide a readout of the meeting for all of you.

Thank you, oh, Great Federal Flunky! Thank you!

The Secretary and the Foreign Minister from Saudi Arabia discussed a wide range of bilateral and regional issues, including Middle East peace efforts and the current situation in Syria. They met this morning. This is, again, him just coming back from – late last night from 10 days, and so the change in schedule is really just a matter of a very tight schedule. He is back for a couple of days of congressional testimony. He is, again, on the road, as you know, to Istanbul later this weekend. So this is really – I wouldn’t read...

Readers often email me asking what they can do besides feel outrage and helplessness. Here's something. Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) has introduced House Res. 36 to authorize the formation of a Select Committee to investigate what happened on September 11, 2012 and thereafter, including:

how the relevant agencies and the executive branch responded to it and whether appropriate congressional notifications were made;
any improper conduct by officials relating to the attack;
To date, HR 36 has 106 co-sponsors, all Republicans.

If you don't see your representative's name on the list, call up the House office and ask, Why not?

Speaker Boehner -- speaker for the O administration and GOP Establishment is more like it -- says investigating Benghazi is too expensive and time-consuming. (Bohner, obviously, is not a co-sponsor of HR 36.)

The witness's clan, Al-Harbi, makes a prominent showing in the annals of Saudi jihad. Shoebat, co-author with Ben Barrack of The Case for Islamophobia, also explains what clannishness in Saudi Arabia means.

Many from Al-Harbi’s clan are steeped in terrorism and are members of Al-Qaeda. Out of a list of 85 terrorists listed...

The Media Left speculates that persons motivated by the Tea Party, anti-tax, Right-Wing committed the Boston Marathon Atrocity. Alex Jones throws up the "false flag." The Right speculates that this was a jihad attack. Who is right? Details from the US government, which would prefer to tell us nothing (openly, ayway), are sparse, pried out by reporters with good law enforcement sources. Only the Right also cautions against jumping to conclusions, which is correct; however, It is only proper to note that investigators are certainly taking the Saudi trail seriously. We've been down that way before.

Still throbbing with rage over the blast, I am not assuaged by President Obama's loathesome promise: "We will find out why they did this." Why? His words suggest there could be a legitimate reason behind this pain-inflicting, civilization-crushing terrorism....

There is something that Corey Jones, a first-base umpire working high school games in New Mexico, has in common with Ben Carson, conservative star, surgeon and head of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins.

They both violated the New Order in their respective commnunities, one being the high school baseball diamond, the other being academia. They are both being subjected to "re-education" in the public square.

What did they do? Carson, it is well known, declared his opposition to marriage for homosexuals. This violation of New Normal led Carson to withdraw as Johns Hopkins' commencement speaker. Like that poor canary-bird in the coal mine, Carson's experience provides solid evidence there is no "oxygen" in society at large for voicing the age-old convention that marriage is a heterosexual institution for one man and one woman, and no other pairings or groupings.

Corey Jones also gave voice to a convention that is no longer supported by society -- that educators, coaches, and other...

More than 5,000 words into the New York Times Magazine report on everything ex-Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., and his wife, Huma Abedin, want you to know about Weiner’s “sexting” scandal that led him to resign from Congress in 2011, reporter Jonathan Van Meter pauses the story.

Van Meter, a contributing editor at Vogue and New York Magazine, had worked diligently on this New York Times Sunday Magazine cover story – multiple interviews with Weiner and Abedin, both as a couple and separately. On some level, the prurient banality of what he was writing about must have gotten to him.

As he described listening to Weiner discuss the “original behavior” that culminated in the elected official, husband and father-to-be sending a photo of his own torso “wearing gray boxer briefs and an obvious erection” to 45,000 Twitter followers (rather than...

No, not that one -- I got that old, Libya-Redux feeling that the air was going out of the room. That's what happens whenever I see Uncle Sam stepping in to assist, support or enable the same forces of jihad that hit us right between the eyes on September 11, 2001. Only now we call it "Arab Spring." When SecState John Kerry and British Foreign Minister Wm Hague meet with Ghassan Hitto, an American-citizen Muslim Brother and Hamas supporter now fronting the Syrian "opposition," we should call it what it is: submission as the new normal, submission to the forces spreading Islamic law. If you don't want to beat 'em, join 'em -- or at least send them big guns. Maybe they'll point them at Iran (could that possibly be the misbegotten "strategy"?).

So here we go again. Where we once fawned over Tunisia, Tahrir Square, and the Libya opposition, now we fawn over the Syria opposition, currently headed by Hitto. Why worry? After all, as a recent...

Moving right along from soiled place setting (Libya...) to setting (Syria), the Western powers continue to muck up the Islamic world royally, powering the engine of Sunni jihad in a Grand Effort to isolate Iran and its ally Syria, or so it might appear.

It's easy to imagine NATO leaders patting themselves on the backs over their clever little wars on the "cheap" which require "only" Western arms and training and secret operations and money (but they can touch the Saudis and Qataris for much of the money, illegal/schmillegal), all of which, they maybe think, will ultimately vanquish Iran. When one setting is soiled, move on the next.

What they seem to miss -- unless, that is, they are al$o party to it -- is that they are leaving in their wake an equally if not far more dangerous monster: an oil-rich, strategic expanse of virulently metastisizing Sunni Shariadom.

It is most impressive to scroll through the more than 20 pages of names of the 700 retired US special operations forces who have come forward as a group, Special Operations Speaks, to sign a letter in support of Rep. Frank Wolf's House Res. 36 to establish a House Select Committe to investigate Benghazi.

Breitbart has the story and the letter here.

If readers wish to sign petitions in support of the effort, Center For Security Policy's petition is here; Special Operations Speaks' petition is here.

My fine friend and colleague Lars Hedegaard, editor of Dispatch International, sat down with The Daily Caller's Ginni Thomas last month in Washington, DC, for an interview, posted here.

Ginni's first question came down to why -- why have there been so many assassinations and attempted assassinations of Europeans, including against Lars in February, for speaking (and drawing cartoons) about Islam?

Lars replies with the perception and lucidity that are second nature to him.

It all comes from the fatwa in '89 against Salman Rushdie. If they could pull that off without any serious consequences in Tehran, then, of course, the way was open to others to try the same thing. What it comes down to is, basically, the contention by the powers-that-be in the Muslim world that sharia law has in fact been established as the law of Europe. They seem to think they have...

The AP Stylebook has opened a new chapter on the non-"offensive" Engllsh-language lexicon to parse the war on the world waged by Islam. The wire service bible (can I say that?) has decreed that "Islamist" is out as a "a synonym for Islamic fighters, militants, extremists or radicals."

Hallelujah. I long ago learned to loathe the mongrel term, which is not to say it wasn't sometimes imposed on me by copy editors who didn't know better until they received, gratis, a piece of my mind. At the same time, this is not to say that the AP and I have to come to this aversion for the same reasons.

Here's my problem with "Islamist" as demonstrated by Charles Krauthammer back in 2006 (from pp.199-200 of The Death of the Grown-Up). Correctly declaring that fear, not "sensitivity," had prevented American media from republishing the Danish cartoons, Krauthammer explained:

First, though, I’d like to suggest that anyone reading this column in a local newspaper or news site pat the editor on the back for publishing what in our neo-medieval world of fear amounts to a “forbidden” column.

Yup, I am about to say something about the Great Barack Obama Identity/Eligibility Scandal again. I know that this is one rich and urgent topic that doesn’t see the light of day in certain so-called news outlets – and I say that from the experience of watching my own syndicated columns fail to appear when covering news of the White House press conference where the president’s long-form birth certificate was unveiled, news of courtroom proceedings in various states on Obama’s ballot eligibility and news of Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s investigators presenting evidence that the online Obama birth certificate is a forgery (and much more).

The media is rosy-glowing with stories heralding the opening of George W. Bush's presidential library at SMU later this month, basking in the "presidents' club" angle: namely, how it is that four long-lived former presidents plus Obama will gather to open Bush 43's library, and isn't that cute.

Not so cute -- especially not when the donors who have ponied up in excess of $400 million to build the Bush complex at SMU are allowed to remain anonymous, including the individual or entity that donated $25 million.

The Sunlight Foundation reports that the House last month green-lighted a bill to make public the names of donors who contribute more than $200 to presidential libraries. Amen.

"World Must Unite Against US-Saudi-Israeli Proxy War in Syria" is the headline over a piece at Infowars by Tony Cartalucci, a reporter whose work on Uncle Sam's entanglement in jihad I've read with interest before. The piece makes a moral argument against the war on Assad that I find rather less transfixing than the ghastly spectacle of what he further describes as the US-UK-Saudi-Qatari alliance fighting this war. Call me ethno-centric, but I keep going back to the basic question: What is Uncle Sam doing running around with sharia allies remaking the Middle East into sharia-terror states?

Cartalucci connects some important dots -- literally -- by lining up data amassed in 2007 to indicate the Syrian centers from which Al Qaeda fighters entered Iraq with today's "rebel" centers, where the CIA is providing weapons and other assistance. His caption beneath a graphic...

Readers of Aaron Klein's latest piecing together of the Benghazi-Syria arms puzzle will take special notice of the role that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appears to have played in pushing the policy to arm the jihad front fighting Assad.

It was the New York Times in February that highlighted Clinton's "activist" plan to “vet the [Syrian] rebel groups and train fighters, who would be supplied with weapons.” In essence, this was just Libya Redux. In Libya, of course, any supposed figleaf "vetting" process failed to stop the US and NATO from both arming and militarily enabling the victory of jihad forces over the anti-jihad Qaddafi -- a red-line-crossing I think of as Uncle Sam joining the jihad. "Our" jihadis in Libya were actually led by senior members of "al Qaeda" in Europe and the Med, with close, demonstrable links to the perpetrators of the catastrophic jihad attacks on London, Madrid, Tunisia and Casablanca -- as John Rosenthal lays out in his shocking, dot-connecting new book...